A blog to discuss my experience of being in reunion with my birthfamily for the last twenty-five years. It's about identity and the integration of my life with my birthmother's and the unique blended family that forms as a result.

Friday, December 19, 2014

Sometimes I wish I could just take a break from adoption and reunion. The holidays are hard enough, family drama is inevitable. When you're in reunion with all branches of your family, your chances of some kind of chaos are inevitable.

I've been in reunion for over twenty years and it's still hard for me to have my various families come together. I don't know why it is that way. It should have normalized by now. But, it hasn't. As I plan my holidays, I'm trying to get everyone in. But it's not working.

This has been one of the busiest times of my life having just finished by first term of my MBA while working full-time and having my family responsibilities. Aside from my kids and my husband, my family responsibilities also include taking care of my 83 year old adoptive mom. She's doing great - she's healthy and strong. But, I'm in charge of bills, business and planning. It's a lot.

So when I try to fit in my birthfamilies, I get stuck. There's not time, there's not space. Not enough, not for everyone. I can understand that family and friends may feel left out of my life right now, that I'm neglecting them. I get it. I wish I had more time than what I have to give to my immediate family, my work and my school. But that's all I have right now.

I know I'm fortunate. I know I'm lucky to have so much family that loves me. But sometimes it ends up feeling like a weight and a burden. I am not enough for everyone.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

The florist asked what I wanted the card to read for Kate's birthday flowers. "Happy Birthday..." I said, and paused.

I'm usually terrible with birthdays and planning ahead to send a gift. Flowers were a great solution, but the card...

Kate and I have not come to a good solution of what to call her in terms of her relation to me. My relationship to her is simple enough - I'm her daughter. But, referencing her is more challenging.

We've been in a limbo of birthmother for a long time. Neither of us find that satisfying. There's so much more to our connection, our heritage. She didn't just give birth to me. She and my birthfather are my blood, my lineage, my people - but is she my mother?

On one level, yes. Last year, over dinner, Kate argued that technically she is my mother - that it's a biological fact. I said I understood that, but that there was more to it. We left the dinner unresolved. There was no tension, it was a pleasant, well-intended conversation, and we left dinner happy. But the content of the discussion has stuck with me ever since.

By being part of a writing group with adult adoptees, this is not an unique question. We all struggle with what our relationship to our first parents ("first" happens to be one of the terms used) are, should be, what we want them to be. What to call them is an issue in and of itself.

Some of the adoptees I know are passionate enough to take action to re-form the break that happened at birth and legally change their names to include their birth names. The first time I heard of someone doing that, I felt electrified.When you're taught, as adoptee, to accept your adoptive parents as your only parents, taking back your birthname seems like a shocking and rebellious act. But, really, it just makes sense. We all come from somewhere - and telling adoptees that they don't really screws with the mind. I believe children who are relinquished for adoption should keep their birth names. They should never have to lose them. Taking our original names away is cruel - it's a severing that is equivalent to a lie. You can add on your adopted family name, but you should still get to recognize where you came from. Even if you're not in contact with your first families (yet another term sometimes used), having the name at least keeps you connected to the earth.

I love the idea of taking back my family birth names. I would love to do it. I picture doing it with ceremony, including Kate and John as part of it - and fully recognizing just where I came from. It would be emotionally huge. But I won't do it. Not yet, anyway, I won't put my mom through that -my adoptive mom. I'm not brave enough for that.

But, I thought, maybe I could be brave enough to at least recognize Kate as my mother on her birthday flowers.

My birth-sister refers to Kate as Mama. I always thought it a little out of place for an adult to call their mother, "Mama." It's a baby's term. Maybe that could be it, I thought. There was more to us than just birth. For a day or so, I was her baby, and she was my mama. For a day.

"Mama," I said to the florist. "Happy Birthday, Mama" I said. My heart was racing. I felt like the florist would call me out, would know that it wasn't right, would hear my hesitation, but she took the information without comment. Such a small thing, but I felt empowered, emboldened. I did it! I recognized Kate as my mother.

Later that night, Kate called and left a gushing thank you voicemail about the beautiful flowers. She didn't mention the card, but I knew that was included in the gush. She was happy. I was happy. It was perfect.

I was going to class, so I didn't have time to call her back. As the night progressed, my delight started slinking into something else. Something darker. Something like guilt mixed with doubt mixed with sadness.

I did it, but I couldn't do it. Not yet. Something is still not right.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

This is my first post to this new blog. I want it to be a space where adoptees in reunion can talk about their experience...

... as adoptees in reunion - we still feel a little in the dark. It's uncertain, and we all just plod through it on our own. But, when I talk to friends who have had similar experiences as they try to adjust their lives to fit this new, strange, blended family, I am amazed by the reassurance I feel. We are not alone. There are things about this that make sense, that are predictable, that are "normal."

My goal with Kate was to bring the birthmother and adoptee experiences of the same topic out to the world. Having a blog was a way to keep it current, in "real time," vs. a memoir where the focus is mostly on the past.

But, in writing about my adoption experience, I found myself going to my friends who were adoptees to get their points of view. There was so much value and richness in the shared experience. It made it richer and deeper than when I was just talking about it on my own. I had wished I could have that kind of experience for the blog.
Then, I found Lost Daughters. The original intent that I had for my blog was already

out there in the world - I didn't have to create it. Here was a group of women who were all talking about things that I was passionate about, sharing things inherent to the adoption experience that non-adoptees just don't get. And it was such a range of experience and demographic and history.

So, it was about a year after starting ReunionEyes, that I wrote my first post for Lost Daughters. It was thrilling to get a quick response in comments to posts I wrote. It was fascinating reading others' stories - whether it was someone who was still searching for the birth families, or someone who was starting that path, or someone who was struggling in the midst of it all.

What I didn't expect though, was how much being part of that group would change me. Suddenly I was around people advocating for adoptee rights, people who were speaking out against the societal misconceptions about adoption, women unafraid to speak their minds and tell their stories - even if their stories weren't what society thought was acceptable.

Adding my voice to a collective of adoptee voices together transformed my unique, particular experience into a harmony of experiences that expressed the adoptee voice. The whole was greater that the sum of its parts.

One of the Lost Daughter writers decided to #FliptheScript on what society was pushing out into the world about National Adoption Month. She wanted to get the adoptee voice out there too. The adoptee voice needs to be part of the conversation, and she got it out there. Now #FliptheScript has been mentioned in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, along with countless tweets and posts. Now, they're on T.V., on the news talking about #FliptheScript. And ... people are listening.

One of the posts I wrote for #FliptheScript on Lost Daughters was about Loki as an adoptee. It was a post I particularly enjoyed so I decided to share it with my regular facebook friends, not just the adoptee-centered blog connections. Suddenly I was getting responses from people I've known for years and years who said, "I never thought about it that way before."

That's when I started to get what the effect of Lost Daughters can be. What #FliptheScript is doing. It's not just about telling our individual stories, as I've been doing here with Kate. And, it's not just about sharing it among other adoptees - which was what was what I found so exciting about Lost Daughters. It's really about sharing our stories with the world, with everyone, and by doing so reframing the understanding of adoption as a whole.

Sunday, November 23, 2014

What happens when families separated at birth come back together later in life? Well, it makes for confusing holidays.

My holidays are traditional. My mom is up from Florida, we're taking her and the kids to my mother-in-law's house for Thanksgiving dinner. My husband's mom is going to make the turkey and stuffing, we're going to make the pies. This, after all, is my family.

My birth-families are there in the backdrop, not quite a part of things. It's not that I intentionally leave them out, it's more that I don't understand how to fit them in. They have their families, their traditions, their lives. I have mine.

At other times of the year, our reunited life can feel normal-ish - a summer barbecue, for example, where we're all together feels simply ... easy. But, during the holidays, there is a spotlight on the separation.

Although other families have to deal with their family vs. the in-laws and different families from divorce, those are situations of balance - which family do you visit for which holiday. This is different. I could never NOT spend the holiday with my family, opting instead to spend one of the holidays with my birth family. Maybe others can do that, I cannot.

When it was looking like Kate was going to be back in Portland by Thanksgiving, she had planned a large extended family gathering to take place that weekend. Not on Thanksgiving itself, but the Saturday after. It was a way for us to celebrate the holiday together. But through no one's fault, plans changed - both on her end and on mine. Now Kate's extended family Thanksgiving is happening on Thanksgiving itself, and without me. Just as mine is without her.

The results of relinquishment run deep and continue on. Although we are part of each others lives and call each other family, it is still not quite right. Not quite blended. There is segregation - together, but separate. We're looking over into each other's lives. I see the family I should have been a part of, but I am not part of it. It's not that I am unhappy being in the family I am in. It's just a strange experience to be able to see the other life - the one you don't have. We live the natural consequence of a choice made 43 years ago. A choice I had no say in.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Adoption is such a personal, private, and now, public thing for me. I find it interesting that it's such a big part of my life, such a big part of who I am.

I also find it interesting that adoption is promoted, pushed and ... celebrated. It's National Adoption Month. A month where adoption is celebrated.

I love my adopted family. I respect my friends who are adoptive parents. But, I don't think people are really thinking when they are asking to celebrate something that is inherently sad (if not also tragic, life-altering and painful). It shows an inherent ignorance in what adoption is. It's trying to be something it isn't. I don't think people realize that at it's core, it's propaganda. It's a lie. Adoption is a big money business and they're selling it.

As an adoptee, I just want to say I don't support National Adoption Month. It's icky. Celebrate love, yes. Celebrate family - whatever your family make-up is. But don't celebrate someone's core tragedy.

Friday, October 3, 2014

I had always been an avid writer, but everything I wrote was tucked away in journals. The experience of writing the blog has been very different. It's a mix of trying to be exposed enough so that I'm honest, while being resolved enough that I'm not just spewing.

It's very different than how I am in my real in-person life. I don't like being so exposed in my feelings. Friends would describe me as somewhat reserved, I think. It's a more comfortable space for me. I am not in my element being so out about my feelings. It's not my nature.

I'd kept to my journals for so long because writing for an audience takes a bit more arrogance than I have in me. Why should I think I have anything to say that's worth reading? If I didn't have my experience of reunion, I think I would have kept to my journals. But I feel like the story is worth sharing. I want it to make sense to others. I hope maybe it can be of service. Maybe someone who is going through something similar will get some insight out of it, recognition or hope or relief of just a knowing nod. Maybe.

But, I just wanted YOU to know that this is hard for me. This is not something I go into lightly. Right now, as you're reading this, I am cringing just a bit, hoping it is worthwhile.

But, I'm also really glad to be sharing it with you. You know a little more about me, and maybe there's value in that. Maybe it's not about arrogance or self-centeredness ... maybe it's about connection. And there's value in that.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

After college, I accepted Kate's invitation to come out to Portland. I would spend the summer "rubbing elbows with my genes." It was supposed to be for the summer. Instead, it lasted eighteen years.

It was such good fortune. I was eighteen when I met Kate. I went to college for four years and then moved out to Portland. And then, for just as long as we were apart - eighteen years - we were together, living in the same town. It still blows me away.

It felt like we cheated fate. Kate had relinquished her rights to be my parent, she promised to stay away from me, we had no way of finding each other, yet there we were - together. It was a precious, unexpected gift.

I fully expected it to end.

It was a few years ago that Kate told me she was leaving Portland. Despite all that time we had been living together in the same town, I still wasn't surprised that she was leaving. It was as if we had been on borrowed time all along. It might have been eighteen years we were together, but there was part of me that was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I think that's the burden of reunion. No matter how long you're in it (and for us, it's been over twenty-five years now), the initial wounds never fully heal. Rationally, I know we're solid. I know she loves me unconditionally and completely. But, she left me. When I was a baby. When I needed her.

No matter how long Kate and I might be together, I will always expect her to leave. I can't help it...

Only now she's coming back.

I am thrilled to have her and Steve in our lives again. Not that they weren't in our lives. It was fun to visit Seattle, and to have them stay with us when they would come to Portland ... but there's so much more richness to living in the same town. They can come to the boys' soccer games, or meet us for dinner, or Kate can smuggle me out for a drink some spontaneous evening. My boys can have the music lessons I lacked. They can have the family that I was denied AND still have my adoptive family both. Complete.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Lately, I've been trying to connect more to my earth-mother more than my birth-mother. The East-Coast raised cynic in me is feeling all mushy towards New Age mentality. But it is a star-crossed pairing.

A few weeks ago I went to an acupuncturist when I felt a migraine coming on. I'd done acupuncture for migraines before and it's worked for me astonishingly well. I just don't understand why sticking a needle in my arm suddenly makes the pain in my skull go away, but it does, so I accept that it works while also knowing that acupuncture doesn't make logical sense to me. As usual, it did the trick, but as we wrapped up, the acupuncturist asked if I would be interested in trying acupuncture for my depression (it had come up during the intake assessment).

I had abandoned taking drugs for my depression because I felt that altering my feelings with medication might mean that I was missing out on valuable information coming from inside myself. Like maybe I hated my job? Or maybe adult responsibilities were killing my joy? There were lots of things going on, and I wanted to understand them. I didn't want to take something so I could trick myself into feeling that I was happy; I wanted to make the changes in myself and in my life so that I could be happy.

Don't get me wrong, anti-depressants are a life-saver, literally. There are times when it gets so bad that

it's essential to have that help. I've taken anti-depressants with good results. Gratefully, I am at a point where my depression is mild enough that I can go without drugs, but where the depression is still overshadowing my otherwise lovely life that I would really like to just enjoy without the dark feelings creeping around all the time.

I've gone to the acupuncturist three times now to get treatment for my depression. The first session left me feeling horrible, devastated - I just went straight to bed when I got home. I wasn't sure if I should go back, but I did. The next session had me feeling energized and excited. The last one has left me a intensely jumbled mix of the two.

If nothing else, the experience has been fascinating. I believe that the acupuncture is more spiritual than
it is physiological. THAT makes a lot more sense to me than the physiological side of it.

I feel like it's caused a seismic shift internally, spiritually, getting further faster than talk therapy (after all, words don't really work for the subconscious). While I'm still experiencing the emotional tremors, it is releasing a lot of bad energy that's been pent up under heavily reinforced barricades. I think that's a good thing.

After my sessions, I like to go to a Tea Bar & Spa a few blocks down from my acupuncturist's office to journal and reflect. The cafe is perfectly new agey: selling tea and kombucha while also providing raw-food facials. I feel like a tourist when I go there, the outsider looking in.

I just wish I could abandon my cynicism and embrace the New Age with an open heart AND mind. I love that Kate is so emotionally open that she can cry buckets or gush love. I joke about the "Power Mushiness" (most everyone in the family is super-lovey & emotional) and how it skipped me. I know I am more an introvert like my dads (both adopted and birth), and I still prize the grounding that cynicism provides too much to abandon it.

But, sometimes I wish I could just believe, even if I don't understand.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

It does not come naturally for me to show vulnerability. Most adoptees, I suspect, cherish their strength. Even as a child, I eschewed the more feminine traits that were supposed to be more attractive - humility, vulnerability, invisibility. I wanted to be seen as strong, independent, tough. Living in Jersey could have been part of that too. Jersey girl ... you know.

As a society we value strength immensely. We praise someone for being strong, overcoming obstacles, pushing through. For me, strength was the default. It was a defense, a barrier. It disguised my true feelings of loss, inferiority, hopelessness.

In my reunion with Kate, all the strength I'd developed as an adoptee faltered, weakened, fell. I couldn't be strong and still face the issues that reunion surfaced. It wasn't until the defenses collapsed that I was able to feel all the awful emotions spiraling my relinquishment and adoption. I didn't want to feel them, but I had to.

After the honeymoon phase of reunion with Kate, I'd pulled away. I didn't know why. Part of me wanted to go back to not knowing, just be able to be who I was before the pandora's box of reunion was opened. Maybe I could sense that the negative feelings that were just starting to bubble up would roll over into a boil in I kept her in my life.

I think that's the point where many reunions falter. The adoptee senses that their foundation is cracking and if they keep allowing it to be pushed and prodded it will fall. I tried to pull away, Kate didn't let me. She kept at me, asking what was wrong. I tried to just ignore her. She wouldn't go away. She asked if I would go with her to therapy, and I conceded. It was that moment of weakness, of giving in, that changed everything.

In therapy, my defenses were attacked. My defenses, after all, made everything so nice and tidy. With them, it made sense why Kate relinquished me - she was young, she didn't plan on getting pregnant, it would have been a huge burden. I got it. I would have liked it if that was enough. But logic is not enough. Strength is not enough. Weakness won.

For me, allowing myself to be weak took so much more strength than simply being strong. I had to feel all the things that came up - loss, inferiority, hopelessness. And anger, so much anger. We got through it, and somehow made it out on the other side.

So, now when things come up in my life and I feel strong, that things are matter-of-fact, that I need to accept things as they are, it's usually a sign I need to take a step back and work on being weak.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

I am curious what it is like for someone who is not adopted to look through old family photos. Do you wonder about your connection to these unknown people from the past? Do you scan the faces to see if they are similar to your own? Do you try to understand how you, individual quirky you as you are, fit into this family?

Recently, one of Kate's brothers started a Facebook page of family photos that he's dug out of the archives of his parents' home. It was started as a gift to Kate's mom for her 90th birthday.

I was included in the facebook group; only family had access. I was relieved. It feels terrible when I'm forgotten, and yet I can understand why I would be. I wasn't included as part of the family for the first eighteen years of my life.

As pictures were uploaded, I would look through distractedly as one does with someone else's family photos - cursory glances mostly.

Then, one day a couple weeks ago, I opened one of the photos when it popped up in my email. It was one with Kate and her siblings in their teen years and it was funny to see these people that I've come to know as adults when they were kids. I could see their resemblance to their adult selves, people that I now knew as part of my life, and it hit me -

I wasn't looking at photos of someone else's family... I was looking at pictures of my family.

It's strange to forget that a family is yours, certainly, but when you have your whole life spent in a different family, a family who is not your blood, but where you are told they are your family, the only family that matters, it gets ingrained. I've forgotten for most of my life that I have other family.

I knew I came from somewhere else but it had ended at the birthmother. I think that's one of the reasons that's such an inadequate term. It insinuates that birth is where the connection ends, as if it were just a moment in time. As if, once you were given birth to, the connection to that family ended and the new one began. As if, the birthfather and that side of your family doesn't exist at all that existed in your life was in the womb of your birthmother and then the start to your real life with your new family.

But life isn't good with clean cuts like that. It doesn't quite work. I came from a mother and father who each came from a mother and father who each did as well. I'm connected to each and every one of them. They are all in my DNA. All of them.

So the family photos took on new meaning. This is the family I wasn't a part of. The family I was cast out of. Not my family, and yet they are mine. It's hard to get one's head around it.

I started looking at the pictures differently as the feelings about the pictures morphed and changed and evolved.

Saturday, August 30, 2014

On Sunday I brought my adoptive mom, husband and kids to St. Francis park to watch Kate and Steve play music. They were playing as part of a celebration for the park. Normally, I might have skipped it. While St. Francis is a beautiful park in the middle of southeast Portland with a gorgeous water feature that streams along the length of the park, it's inhabited by the homeless and I just don't feel safe letting the kids walk barefoot or roam out of my direct line of sight.

My mom seems comfortable with visiting with Kate and Steve and enjoys their music. We don't talk about it often, but she accepts Kate as part of my life. I don't think my mom sees Kate as a threat, just as an addition to the family not unlike how my husband's family is now part of ours.

But there are aspects of the two worlds coming together that are challenging for me; music has always been one. My parents gave me music lessons and bought me a piano, they wanted me to have music. I just didn't follow up with it, I let it slide away. Music just wasn't part of our lives. It wasn't a fault, it's just that my adoptive parents didn't happen to be musical themselves. I didn't grow up around people playing music.

After meeting Kate when I was 18, I've wondered if music would have been different for me had I been raised by her, had known that it was part of my heritage not just with Kate but also with her siblings and father and even my birthfather. I would have been surrounded by music had I grown up with my birthfamilies.

So, it's important for me for the kids to be able to see Kate perform. I want them to understand that's something that they can do too, if they want to.

The kids, not knowing my intent in bringing them, spent their time playing in the water feature and using a bubble-blower gun to overtake the park with wild bubbles. They didn't really listen to the music. I'm not even sure if they were aware that the songs Kate and Steve performed were ones they had written.

As usual, the kids pick up on more than I expect.

A few days later, my 6-year old announced he would like to perform a song he just wrote, "The Only Way I Can Be Happy is if I See the Universe." He brought out the little kid guitar (a gift from Kate and Steve) to the backyard and sat on the porch. My mom, my 8-year-old and I took our seats in the plastic

chairs in the yard. He sang and strummed the guitar about a deep yearning to go up into the sky and see the universe, how he could never be happy until that happened. He sang loud and clear, seeming unconcerned with the potential audience of neighbors surrounding us.We applauded and told him our favorite parts and he spent the rest of the evening working on the lyrics, writing them down on paper in his kindergarten writing. It inspired the 8-year old to write a song, "It's a Burning World Without You." The next day, we came home to a sign on the front door, "Consert Tonite," and they performed their final songs for their new nanny and us.

Maybe they would have written songs and played for us without being exposed to Kate and Steve performing. But, maybe by seeing them they realized they could do it too. Maybe we need to be exposed to the family that came before us to know what we our capable of ourselves.

Monday, August 11, 2014

Me, my husband and our beloved dog, Otto.
Kate is just to the right of me in the picture.

Eleven years ago yesterday, on 8/10/03, I got married.

I am pretty traditional when it comes to weddings (well, ignoring the big hairy dog bounding in the picture). I believe it is a celebration not only for the couple getting married but also for the families. I am not someone who would elope or limit my wedding to a small, select group. I believe our family and friends create the community that helps support and foster the marriage. The wedding represents not only who you are as a couple, but your family as well.

The family that attended my wedding was very different from the family I'd started out with.

My wedding was traditional in a lot of ways. My dad gave me away (the feminist in me lost the argument to the sweet sentiment of the ritual). My mother sat in the front row.

But, aside from a cousin of my mom's, I didn't have people from my adoptive family there. My adoptive family is small. I had a brother, but he had passed away years before. I didn't have any living aunts or uncles. My cousins, all significantly older than my brother and me and residing on the other side of the country, weren't able to come.

It would have been a very small wedding on my side of the family if my definition of family hadn't expanded significantly years before when I'd reunited with my birthmother and birthfather, and, to some extent, their families. So, in addition to my mother and father, I had my birthmother, Kate, there. Two of her sisters (my aunt Mary & aunt Gina), one of her brother's (my uncle Steve) and one of her cousin's (though he had to be reminded of who I was - we'd only met once before) came. Her daughter, my birth-sister, Abby, was one of my bridesmaid's. My birthfather came.

My dad and mom are in the front row. Behind my mom is Kate. To her
right is her husband, Steve, and to her left is my birthdad, John.

My family was full. And, the parts of me that had been unknown or unrecognized were unearthed as well. For me, the wedding symbolized the integration of who I am from all these different families. Although I was only 28 when I'd met my husband-to-be, I had been in reunion with my birthmother ten years and had just found my birthfather a month earlier. When we married four years later, he knew he was coming into a family of many branches. He knows me as who I am, as all of me, and all of my families.

The wedding was a blend of those families. The rehearsal dinner was a fun, casual backyard barbeque at my mother-in-law's. The wedding had two receptions. The first was hosted by my birthmother at the ceremony site in the woods where we were married, where she had married her husband, Steve, several years earlier. She had prepared the food and brought it with her. The second reception, was hosted by my parents, back in the city and was the traditional reception with the opening dance, full dinner, wedding cake et al.

It was the way I was able to incorporate all of my families into one wedding.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

For adoptees, normal doesn't come naturally. We make it up as we go along. Placed into families that have no relation to our own biological roots, we adjust to our environment. Our adoptive parents' nationalities become our own along with their family heritage, their traits. It's what society has designed for adoption - just go along as if it's normal. So, we pretend to be something we're not. We do it for so long, we get so used to it, we forget that it's not normal.

Seeking reunion with my birthfamilies, I've reconnected to those roots, but it's splintered. Neither quite fits. So, my relationship with my birthfamilies, but especially with my birthmother and birthfather has had to develop it's own normal.

When I met Kate twenty-five years ago I never imagined her as part of my life. I didn't imagine I would travel across country and live with her in her apartment for a summer when I was 22. I didn't picture buying a house just a couple miles from hers eight years later. I didn't expect to find my birthfather on the liner notes of a CD. But, somehow, that's become part of our normal.

Normal now is that my husband has at least three mother-in-laws. My kids have multiple sets of grandparents (they don't complain). Holidays are complicated. Family reunions are emotional time bombs (okay, at least those last two are probably normal for most people : )

But what also is normal for me is knowing the whole of all the parts that make up the sum of who I am. I have more people in my life, more people who are family. That means how I define family has had to be reworked a bit. How I define myself had to be reworked too.

Normal now is having people in my life who seemed imaginary at first. It's being someone a lot more complicated than who I started out as. And it's being comfortable in not being normal.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

I didn't have grandparents while I was growing up. As a child of older parents, as a lot of adoptive children are (after all, adoption is the last resort after years of trying, and then the whole ordeal of adoption can take years), my adoptive grandparents were dead by the time I was born. I always envied my friends who had grandparents, imagining they were enjoying getting spoiled rotten and eating fresh-baked cookies that they helped make.

Reunion gave me the chance to finally have grandparents. After all, I was only 18 when I first met Kate. A few years after that, I had the opportunity to meet Kate's parents, my grandparents. Kate lived in Oregon, I was in Jersey finishing college, so I was on my own for the get together. My grandfather came to pick me up from the train station in New Jersey, I lived with my parents about an hour away. He swooped his car right up next to me, though we hadn't yet met. I asked how he knew it was me, and he said with a smirk, "Oh, I could tell."

He took me back to his home and I met with him and Kate's mom, my grandmother. We each sat in different corners of the living room, having a conversation about who knows what - I remember none of it. I just remember the odd mix of feeling excitement, kinship, warmth and welcome alongside of the knowledge that they were the main deciders that I would be cast away from their family. So, the friendliness was more than a little awkward.

And while I have some memories of Kate's dad's humor and personality, her mom was mostly ghost-like to me. She didn't say much and I could feel her keep her distance.

That was twenty years ago. While my relationship with Kate, my birthfather, my sisters, and my aunts and uncles has twisted, turned, deepened and richened over the years, my relationship with my birth-grandparents has remained frozen, stuck in friendly awkwardness. They don't reach out to me, and I don't to them. We exist in our worlds, known to each other but unknown.

As my birth-grandmother reaches her 90th year, I wonder if she ever thinks of me.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

A week or so ago, I dropped my car off at the mechanic's close in on East Burnside. The bus was going to be awhile, so I decided to walk a few stops. I came to the Burnside bridge and it was such a perfect summer day, I decided to just walk the rest of the way to work.

As I came to Skidmore Fountain, I was struck with a visceral memory of first coming to Portland. Kate brought me there on a weekend to the Saturday Market. I remember standing in the area of the fountain with the street performers competing for attention with the art booths selling everything from crafted wooden boxes with secret compartments to large panels of batik fabric to handmade pottery to duct tape art. I walked up to the fountain itself, the noise of the water tumbling from the upper bowl held by three bronze women to the larger base below mixing in with the sounds around me. Messing around by the side of the fountain were some Portland street kids, where it's unclear whether they're homeless or just appearing that way from their excessive piercings and tattoos. Although dressed as tough, they seemed less threatening than a majority of the normal people I would walk across in New Jersey. The green of the trees framed the plaza, the Willamette just beyond the trees.

I was swept up by the energy of Portland at that moment. I felt enchanted and charmed by the city. I had come from New Jersey knowing nothing about Oregon and even less about Portland. You have to understand, people from the New York City area live in such an insular way, its like there's no world outside of itself. It's not a question of why you would ever live somewhere else, it more like that the rest of the world doesn't really exist. So discovering this place, alive with a creative, cheerful energy emanating from its center, pulled me right in. I wanted to know everything about the city then, explore everything it had to offer, get swept up in the energy around me.

That memory of being at the fountain with Kate in my first days of Portland, made me realize how inexorably intertwined Portland has been in the story of my reunion with Kate. As a twenty two year old, just graduated from college, I was ripe for discovery. I had come from the other side of the country to discover not only my birthmother, but who I was and what I wanted from life, including where I wanted to live. Although I'd planned on a year or more of traveling, once I'd met Portland, I felt all I needed to discover was right here.

As I walked along waterfront park, my mind scrolled through all the places in Portland that were meaningful in my reunion with Kate from having lunch in one of the city parks, to going to a concert at the zoo, having a glass of wine at the Vat, stopping in at Artichoke Music on Hawthorne, or the many nights of music at the East Ave.

It's so vivid in my memories, and so meaningful to our story. As I turned up the hill at Market Street, heading towards my office building at PSU, I smiled thinking about how I still don't take Portland for granted. I am still charmed and enchanted, whether running down the street with the kids to cheer on my husband during the Naked Bike Ride, or sitting on the corner of Hawthorne drinking coffee and listening to a busker playing an electric cello and still looking like a street person, or having a tree-lined park dotted with fountains alongside the river, already buzzing with a cheerful energy on a weekday morning as I walk to work.

I walked to the center of the PSU Urban Center, with its fountain rushing over, splashing to the base below. The door to my building behind me, I took a moment before going into work, wanting to be part of the moment in the plaza, so happy to have found this place to call home.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Today, my oldest son turns eight. Both of my sons have a good relationship with their birth-grandparents. I think they both understand the difference between my birthparents and my adoptive parents and seem comfortable with everyone.

We have a family rule that all questions are okay. It doesn't matter if the topic is "inappropriate" as my kids would say. At this stage, it's usually in reference to bad words or potty talk, though there was also a question that the kids worried was inappropriate when they asked if married people kiss more often than non-married people ("yes and no" was my answer). What's interesting is that they haven't yet asked why I was relinquished for adoption, why didn't my mom keep me? And, what will that mean for them - will there be fear that I could give them away? It nags at me, lurking. Why haven't they asked?

I don't know exactly what I will say. I will tell them that Kate was very young, too young to be a parent - and give the examples of teenage girls they know to give them perspective.

I will skip the things I've always been told, the things that now get under my skin, "it was for the best, and, she wanted a better life for me." I will try to stay closer to the harder truth, "It was just too hard for a single young woman in that time to raise a baby."

Something about saying that truth, even to myself, is reassuring to me. It was just too hard. She didn't have the resources, she didn't have help or support.

But there's the darker truth too, that she didn't want the baby. Even though there is regret now, the truth at the time was that she didn't want me. That part, I think, is just too sad to share.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Family vacations are to summer, what Christmas is to winter - a time to gather family that should be relaxing, beautiful and idyllic but too often is stressful and disappointing.

Two years ago, Kate asked me to join in on a family vacation. She and Steve were playing at a festival in Hood River in July, so she invited me and my birth-sister to bring our kiddos along and join them for the weekend.

In an email, Kate described it as:

"... a wonderful, family-friendly lavender festival on the farm of friends...the best place to get lavender for your garden, essential lavender oil - eat a bunch of good food, see crafts and hear a little music amidst field of purple fragrance - lovely.

It's a beautiful area in the Rowena Wilds on the Mosier Ridge and there are lots of wild turkeys, eagles, deer, an occasional cougar and high desert air.

If you would like to take this chance to get together, we'd love to have you come out, whether it's for the day, the weekend or a few days. It'd be nice to get the little cousins together."

Lovely, right?

Reading it again now, I can see that Kate was a little too convincing, putting a much harder sell on the idea than there needed to be. I only realize now that it must have been hard to ask me, the relinquished daughter, and my sister, displaced from Kate's life by divorce, to come on a "family" vacation.

Thing is, on a day to day basis, my relationship with Kate feels really quite normal. We're family. Not a simple mother-daughter family, but our reconstructed version of family that's come together as adults. An invitation to a weekend didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary for us. It sounded ... lovely.

Unfortunately, I had just started a new job and had a work conflict the weekend she would be there. My parents were also going to be with me for the summer, and I hated leaving them to do things without them. It wasn't going to work. I hate to disappoint, and avoided telling her that I couldn't go.

My lack of communication led to an response from Kate where she'd surmised I wasn't getting back to her because my parents were in town, which she hadn't known about, which distressed her that she didn't know what was going on in my life.

Ah.

We've not yet figured out a way to have a family vacation together. Kate has fond memories of her husband's parents gathering their grown-children and families together every summer either on the beach at the Hamptons or, later, at their summer home in Woodstock. Her own family of seven siblings will have the occasional reunion at her sister's farm. I imagine Kate would like to create that for her next generation.

A year or so following my initial reunion with my birthfather, I joined him for his annual family vacation with his immediate family and friends at a music festival in the woods of Mendocino, California. It was four days of music, camping, dancing, and celebration.

Lovely, right?

Every year since, I've wanted to go back. Once I had kids of my own, I have desperately wanted to bring them there, so that could experience the magic of that experience that I hadn't had myself until I was an adult. Too late, and yet better late than never.

My adoptive parents enjoy a different kind of travel. They like to go to foreign places, enjoying the view of the culture from the safe distance of nice hotels, and fancy restaurants where they eat fine food. I went with them to Hawaii a few years back. We stayed at a beautiful resort on Maui and went to a different expensive restaurant every night. I asked at one of the fancy restaurants where to go for local food. The waitress told me I wouldn't want to, my family laughing at my desire to sample spam and seaweed. At the time, I was hurt. I didn't like getting mocked for wanting to learn about the culture, not just view it from a difference. But, now I see it's just that I like different things than what my adoptive parents like. I like the kind of things my birthparents like.

A family separated most of their lives doesn't come together easily. I have my family - the family Kate chose for me to be with. As much as I wish to be able to have a family vacation with Kate, or my birthfather, I haven't figured out a way to make it fit into my life. I was given to a different family, a family I love. As different as I am, I am theirs, and have the obligations that go along with it.

I am bringing my husband and kids to Florida to vacation with my mom on Sanibel Island later this summer. I've found out the hard way that it's easier for me to compromise what I would like to do, and settle on staying at a resort, than to try to get my mom to enjoy camping (I've tried - it didn't go well).

It's the fate of the adoptee to be in families foreign to them. The similarities and synchronicities of reunion shine a spotlight on that. In reunion, there's validation for who you are, understanding of where your likes, dislikes, and quirks come from. You get to see your lineage, but you still don't get to belong to your original families. After all, you belong to another family, one that is different from you.